One of my favorite stories: Ferdinando el Toro / Ferdinand the Bull

Update - 12/4/17: Arianne Dowd has created some amazing resources to go along with the trailer! Click here to see them

You may have seen that Ferdinando el Toro / Ferdinand the Bull is being made into a movie. I am very excited about that and will definitely use it in the future, but in the meantime, I love using the Disney short film to start my unit about Bianca Nieves y los siete toritos, a novel by Carrie Toth. I blogged about it a couple of years ago, but wanted to share the Ferdinando materials again because I just used them and it went to well with my Spanish 2 students. Also, I LOVE this story!! And I think students do too!

The slideshow is basically what I did during one and a half days of class (85 minute class periods). And this is the quiz they took the third day. I have taken a TPRS/CI approach to Spanish 2 this year, so I have been working hard all semester to pull it all together. When I previously taught Spanish 2 (three or four years ago), my students would have had a very hard time with this lesson, but now we breezed right through it with success and confidence, mostly because my version of the story is told with lots of high frequency vocabulary that they know! I have not "taught" them the imperfect yet, but they are very comfortable with it because they have seen it in stories. I have "taught" them the preterite, and by that, I mean: I used it in stories, used verbs in the preterite as "vocabulary words," then used Martina Bex's guided notes.

So, here is what we did:

• Reviewed previously learned vocab (slides 2-3)
• New vocab: repeated and acted out new vocab, played Quizlet Live (best way to introduce new vocabulary!) with it, answer questions with images, and translated sentences with new vocab  (slides 4-8)
• The Story, Questions, and Watch segments: I told them the story of Ferdinando with the slides. Students saw pictures and listened as I read to them. After 1-4 slides, there are questions about what I said. Students answer on white boards. They could answer in English, Spanglish, or Spanish. They could answer in complete sentences or in one word answers. Students held up white as they finished. (This is great fantastic differentiation and formative assessment.) Throughout this process, I am writing words on the board as well. (slides 9-74). Students also got to watch short segments as I told the story.
• For homework, students did rewrote the new vocabulary and re-read the story and drew images to represent each segment. I also recommended some textivate activites (slide 76).
• Before the quiz, we did a dictado activity (slides 75-86). Students did so well during this activity!
• There is another listen and draw activity in the unit packet on page 7, but we did not do that.
• Click here for a doc (created by @jenny68100 ) with pics to help with a retell and/or listen and identify picture activity.

• If you are looking to use this story with a higher level class, here is the transcript.

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